TIL that the scp command does not, by default, compress files it transfers, and that you need to add the -C flag to make it do that, and by doing that I have sped up my transfer speed about 40x, and without this knowledge I have probably wasted literally days of my life waiting for things in the past.
@jimbob put the worms back in the can where they belong!
Um yeah, I think at one stage i learnt that, but I suspect it was forgotten amongst far too many other options and defaults